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Currie Sauce

A tomato-based sauce thickened with flour and flavored with curry powder, onions, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Currie Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat.

  2. Add chopped onion to skillet and fry until golden brown.

  3. Stir in tomatoes and stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Reduce heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes.

  5. Mix flour with a little butter to form a paste, then add paste to the sauce to thicken.

  6. Season with salt and pepper.

  7. Strain through a sieve.

  8. Stir in curry powder.

Serve

  1. Serve with rice croquettes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and, with flour, forms the paste that thickens it.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as a starch-based roux paste.
Tomatoes
Provide acidity and body to the sauce base.
Stock
Supplies the liquid that forms the body of the sauce.
Curry powder
Adds aroma and spiced flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour paste. Flour must be cooked in fat and whisked into the simmering liquid without lumps. Raw flour tastes pasty, and if it is dropped in unmixed it clumps and the sauce thickens unevenly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, flour, pepper):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, flour, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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